Directional interactions in the human brain: the leading role of subcortex
Poster No:
1242
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Alessandro Nazzi1, Michele Allegra2, Maurizio Corbetta2
Institutions:
1University of Padova, Padova, Padova, 2University of Padova, Padova, Italy
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
While human neuroscience has traditionally focused on the neocortex, recent literature highlights the key role of subcortical structures in brain dynamics and cognitive processes. In our previous work (Favaretto et al., Nat. Comms. 2022; Nazzi et al., biorxiv 2024), we showed that subcortical regions are involved in global connectivity switches, hinting at a general relevance of cortical-subcortical interactions in whole-brain dynamics. However, our analysis did not reveal whether the leading role in dynamics is played by cortical or subcortical regions.
Methods:
We considered 1078 human participants from the Human Connectome Project, for which resting-state fMRI, as well as fMRI during 7 tasks was available. To characterize directional interactions, we computed whole-brain Granger causality patterns for individual subjects, both at rest and during tasks, and focused our attention on interactions between cortex and subcortex.
Results:
Granger causality results were stable at a group level, when including at least 20 subjects in the analysis, robust with respect to the choice of preprocessing steps, with a similar global pattern in task and rest. For all tasks, we found that the majority of cortical-subcortical links were directed from subcortex to cortex. In particular, we had strong connections from the cerebellum to most cortical networks, and from the thalamus/basal ganglia to sensorimotor networks. The default-mode network received strong incoming connections from most subcortical regions, emerging as an integrator hub of cortical-subcortical connectivity.
Conclusions:
Our findings show that subcortical regions generally play a leading role in cortical-subcortical interactions, hinting at a general relevance of cortico-subcortical interactions in the generation of whole-brain spontaneous actvity patterns in healthy subjects.
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Connectivity (eg. functional, effective, structural) 1
fMRI Connectivity and Network Modeling 2
Keywords:
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Modeling
Sub-Cortical
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Abstract Information
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Please indicate below if your study was a "resting state" or "task-activation” study.
Healthy subjects only or patients (note that patient studies may also involve healthy subjects):
Was this research conducted in the United States?
Were any human subjects research approved by the relevant Institutional Review Board or ethics panel? NOTE: Any human subjects studies without IRB approval will be automatically rejected.
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For human MRI, what field strength scanner do you use?
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Provide references using APA citation style.
Favaretto, C., Allegra, M., Deco, G., Metcalf, N. V., Griffis, J. C., Shulman, G. L., ... & Corbetta, M. (2022). Subcortical-cortical dynamical states of the human brain and their breakdown in stroke. Nature communications, 13(1), 5069.
Allegra, M., Gilson, M., & Brovelli, A. (2024). Directed neural interactions in fMRI: a comparison between Granger Causality and Effective Connectivity. bioRxiv, 2024-02.